Ernő Rubik

Biography

The first cube was made of wood and held together with rubber bands. Rubik cut the blocks, drilled the holes and fastened everything by hand in the university workshop: he chose wood because it was simple and needed no machinery. He had set himself the hard part of the problem: how to make the pieces move without the whole structure falling apart. After he scrambled the faces, it took him a month to solve it.

He was born on 13 July 1944 in Budapest. His father, also named Ernő Rubik, was an engineer at the aircraft factory in Esztergom and designed gliders; his mother, Magdolna Szántó, wrote poetry. In interviews the son almost always named his father as his inspiration and recalled that beside him he learned that work should have a goal and a positive result. His father held several patents, so Rubik later knew the procedure.

From 1958 to 1962 he studied sculpture at a secondary school of fine and applied arts, then until 1967 at the Budapest University of Technology, where he studied architecture and qualified as a civil engineer. After that, until 1971, he continued at the Academy of Applied Arts, in interior design and sculpture. Rubik called his university education the event that shaped his life.

From 1971 he taught architecture at the Budapest College of Applied Arts; by some accounts until 1979, and he received the rank of associate professor there. By his own account in an interview, he was looking for a task for his students. The prototype of the cube was ready in 1974, and Rubik applied for a patent in 1975. The students liked the model, and he realised that the device was simple and could be made cheaply.

Then the difficulties began. In the planned economy of communist Hungary, finding a manufacturer was almost impossible. A small company that worked with plastic and made chess pieces was found. In Hungary the toy was called the “Magic Cube” (Bűvös kocka). At the end of 1977 the state trading company Konsumex began selling it, and in 1979 Rubik licensed it to the American company Ideal Toys. Ideal renamed it Rubik’s Cube and in 1980 launched it on the international market. The road from prototype to mass production took more than six years. By 1980 the cube was sold around the world, and in its first three years more than 100 million authorised units were sold. About fifty books were written on how to solve it. It also became a teaching aid for group theory, and in 1982 the Museum of Modern Art in New York took it into its permanent collection. It seems to me that Rubik himself valued the cube first of all for its spatial idea rather than as a game: he conceived it as a visible object for studying movement in space.

In 1983 Rubik received the Hungarian State Prize. In October of that year he announced that he was giving the state part of the income from the cube, 7 million forints, for a fund supporting the inventions of Hungarian citizens; the State Bank acted as guarantor.

In the early 1980s he edited a magazine of games and puzzles, “…És játék” (“…And Games”). In 1983 he founded his own studio, Rubik Stúdió, where he designed furniture and games. His other puzzles include Rubik’s Snake (1977), Rubik’s Magic, Rubik’s Domino and Rubik’s 360 (2009). A full professor from 1987, in 1990 he founded the Hungarian Engineering Academy with János Ginstler and was its president until 1996. The academy established the International Rubik Foundation for talented young inventors and designers.

In recent years Rubik has worked on video games, written about architecture and run his studio. In 2009 he became an honorary professor of Keimyung University in Daegu, South Korea. From 2014 an exhibition, “Beyond Rubik’s Cube”, devoted to science, technology, engineering and mathematics, toured the world; it opened on 26 April 2014 at the Liberty Science Center in New Jersey. In 2020 he published the book “Cubed: The Puzzle of Us All”.

His awards include the Kossuth Prize (2007), the Hungarian Order of Saint Stephen (2014), the title of National Artist (A Nemzet Művésze, 2014) and honorary citizenship of Budapest (2014).